Recently, I caught up with Marko Bojcun, a Ukraine expert and political scientist at London Metropolitan University. Bojcun has worked in Ukraine on and off for 20 years, and was recently shouted down by rightists in a Kiev bookstore when he attempted to engage in a discussion about the historic role of Leon Trotsky.

Working with local LGBT activists from Mozaika in Latvia, I was lucky enough to be part of the early Riga Pride marches there from 2006, and in the first pride march in Lithuanian capital Vilnius in 2010. Those Baltic Pride events have proved a huge success.

Like other countries, Ukraine will have to consider transitional justice strategies that balance truth-telling and accountability. It will also need a plan for disarming, demobilizing, and reintegrating both pro-independence fighters in Eastern Ukraine, as well as nationalist groups including Right Sector.

Ukrainian and Russian governments are fighting what Russian experts like to describe as an "information war" and, as someone who covered post-Soviet militaries as a journalist for 15 years, I tend to treat claims and counter-claims made by propagandists with a pound of salt.

When countries are in acute difficulties and turn to the United States for support, then they do not expect to be publicly rebuked for corruption. Now, Vice President Joe Biden on a visit to Ukraine has done just this and it may signify a change in U.S. foreign policy approaches to dealing with kleptocratic regimes.

Even from the most cynical Cold-War, money-is-money, dog-eat-dog capitalism-is-capitalism perspective, a redrawn Ukraine would be far more in the West's, rather than strictly "Russian," "ethnic" interest.

Forces at work from Tokyo to Kiev have been roiling the U.S. stock market for a couple of week. But the financial sushi that is now on the menu in Japan, and Russia's "Crimea of the Century" are only part of the story.